James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"I guess," she said sourly. They both slowed to a walk. "We'll find a stream and fish out some lunch. We'll rest while we eat."

They found one, a pretty little stream with a waterfall that was twice Tarrin's height feeding a large pool. Silvery shapes darted to and fro in the water, which was decidedly icy to the touch. Tarrin guessed that the stream was fed right from the Skydancer Mountains, with their ice and glaciers in the higher elevations. Jesmind had him fish out some lunch as she drank farther down, and when she returned, he had three large trout sitting on the leaf-strewn bank. "Only one more," she told him, cleaning and paring them as Tarrin took five minutes to snag the last one. She handed him a flank of fish as he sat down.

He gave her a curious look, a question coming to mind that he'd been meaning to ask her for a while. "What do you do?"

"Do? What do you mean, what do I do?"

"Well, what do you do? When you're not here with me, anyway." He took another bite. "You know, do you make things? Or sew, or what?"

"Ah," she said. "I don't work for a living, Tarrin. Unless you want to call hunting and gathering work. I do have a little garden behind my house, but I admit I'm not there too often. I like to roam around alot. I guess as we get older, just sitting at home isn't quite as sedate as it used to be." She pulled a bone from her mouth and tossed it aside. "It's bloody boring, truth be told. I've never had a child, so I've never really had the urge to stay in one place too long. Mother really gets after me over that," she grunted.

"Over not being married?"

"Tarrin, we don't marry," she told him tersely. "My three sisters all have their own children, and I think my brother Jarlin has sired about twelve. I'm the oldest, but I don't have any children to present to my mother. Well, except for you, but you're not the kind of child she wants. Mother's a busybody, and she probably won't let off of it until I hand her a baby. She tracks me down about every twenty years or so just to see if I'm pregnant or already have a baby, and if I don't, why I'm not trying to track down a male." She made a face. "Last time, I just went home around the time she started looking for me, just to save myself the trouble. That's where she always starts to look."

"Well, how do you earn money?" he asked curiously.

"Money? I've been around a while, Tarrin," she told him with a grin. "I have money. I keep most of it at home, buried in a safe place. But I don't really use it too often. I can provide my own needs. About the only things I ever buy are clothes, and the occasional steel tool." She finished her last bit of fish, and leaned back. "Why all these questions about me, anyway?" she demanded.

"I don't know," he said. "You're a Were-cat, so maybe if if I learn about what you do, then I'll know what I'm supposed to do."

She laughed. "Cub, do whatever you want. If staying in your den all your life is what you want, do it. If you want to spend your life travelling, do it. The only things you can't do are what's proscribed by Fae-da'Nar ."

"What are those?"

"It gets involved, but the core of it is not to give the humans reason to hate us," she told him. "Butchering villages, preying on humans, killing people for no reason. That kind of thing. What would give us a bad reputation."

"Oh."

"The real mess is when you have to learn about the other Fae-da'Nar ," she grunted. "You have to learn the basic customs of the others, and things like that. It's so we don't have misunderstandings and start fighting among ourselves." The wind had blown a strand of hair up inside her ear, and it was flicking reflexively to clear it. Tarrin reached up and pulled it free for her. "Thank you," she said absently. "I see your hair is still growing," she remarked.

Tarrin made a face as he swung his head back and forth, feeling it sway behind him. "I hate it," he complained.

"I'll braid it for you," she offered. "That keeps it more or less under control" She got up and knelt behind him, taking his hair into her hands. Hands, he realized. There was no way she could put her Were-cat paws into his hair like that without him noticing the difference. But a look down showed him that her tail was still there. "You can change only your hands?" he asked.

"I can," she said. "But I can't get rid of my tail or put on human ears without going full human. Some of us can, some of us can't. It depends." She pulled his hair back and started separating it. "It's alot easier just changing your hands, I think. It's not as much of a strain." Tarrin looked down at his paws. "Don't even think of trying," she warned. "When you're as young as you are, you could only do it for a few minutes, and even then it would be excruciatingly painful. Save it for when the gain is worth the pain."

"Alright," he said, bowing his head and letting her braid his hair.

"Tarrin," she said.

"What?"

"If you don't get your tail out from between my legs, we're going to have a disagreement."

"Sorry," he said sincerely, blushing somewhat. "It does what it wants most of the time." He took control of his rebellious limb, snaking out out from under Jesmind and curling it around himself.

After she finished, they started off again on that same ground-eating pace. They held it as the land began to get flat, and the trees slowly began to get larger and larger, with less underbrush, which allowed them to go faster. Tarrin began to see faint signs of human activity, but it was very sparse. It also let him think and he had reached a very simple conclusion.

He had to leave Jesmind.

Not because she was cruel, or mean, or he was afraid of her…it was because he liked her too much. He was getting more and more intrigued by her, and more than once he'd entertained the idea of going with her to her den. He'd already made a promise to go to the Tower, and he meant to uphold it. And the memory of Jenna almost burning Dolanna with fire instilled enough fear into him to make him want to go there. He never wanted that to happen with him. The thought of accidentally burning Jesmind made him even more horrified. He knew that there was nothing he could say to her to make her stop doing what she was doing…because he knew that for one, Jesmind wouldn't change, and the other, that it was who she was that was quickly charming him, not what. Jesmind had a unique, direct approach to life, and a vibrant liveliness and manner about her that was quickly putting him under its spell. She was much like his own mother, and Tarrin wasn't the only boy alive that found the ideal woman to be something like his own mother. She was intelligent, wise, strong, willful, and honest, and those were qualities that he found to be very attractive.

The only question that remained to him was how he was going to do it. He was fairly certain that she could easily track him down, and she seemed to be in much better condition than him, so he was fairly sure that a lead wouldn't matter all that much. He had to fix it so that they were physically separated, or do it in a manner that would make her not want to follow him. But he had no idea how he was going to manage that.

He thought about it the rest of the day, until Jesmind called him to a stop. She looked up worriedly. "We have to find shelter," she told him. Tarrin felt the cold wind, and he knew what she meant. There was a summer storm blowing in. "You go that way, I'll go this way. Look for anything dry."

He followed a small ridgeline for a few moments, but Jesmind called out to him over a rumble of thunder. He followed her scent-trail back to her. There was a fairly large hole in the side of the small rise, leading up rather than down, and from the smell of it she'd already crawled in. "Jesmind!" he called into the small cave as the first drops of rain started to fall.